GPU mining

[GeneralGusher]

Hey I wanted to ask if anyone knows if it would be a good idea to mine bitcoin or any other crypto currency now in 2020. Will it be profitable?

 

BTW i have a 1050 2 gb so i would also like to know if this would be good enough until I save enough for a better gpu.

[Eigenvektor]

No, it most likely would not. Just have a look at how many hashes per second the card(s) can do, how long it would take you (on average) to get a coin and how much money you're going to spend on electricity in the meantime.

[minibois]

10 minutes ago, GeneralGusher said:

Hey I wanted to ask if anyone knows if it would be a good idea to mine bitcoin or any other crypto currency now in 2020. Will it be profitable?

 

BTW i have a 1050 2 gb so i would also like to know if this would be good enough until I save enough for a better gpu.

I have yet to find a good/respectable way of saying 'if you have to ask this, you have not done enough research'. One day I will find the right way of saying that.

Until that time, I can tell you mining Bitcoin itself on videocards is extremely dead and not viable.

 

Many alt-coins are not worth it to mine, unless you have specific ASICs or very power efficient, but high TH/h videocards.

 

But if you're curious, just fire up a calculator and see how much money you would lose.

Because all calculators I used only give negative numbers for this setup (by the time you factor in power cost)

[mariushm]

Think of it like this ... to make some money each month, you would need maybe 20 or more RX 570 or better cards (with 4GB of memory minimum each ) and free electricity (a river and a water generator or some solar panels)

 

A single video card would make equivalent of PENNIES within a month, Also, a lot of mining algorithms require at least 4 GB of video card memory to mine.

 

 

[Eigenvektor]

9 minutes ago, minibois said:

I have yet to find a good/respectable way of saying 'if you have to ask this, you have not done enough research'.

To be fair, asking other people for knowledge is a form of research

 

One problem with mining is that it's essentially an arms race. In order to get a coin, you need to be the first one to get a winning hash. So you need a certain amount of hardware to be fast enough to even have a chance at being first. Naturally, this leads others to upgrade as well. Whenever the hash rate of the network increases too much, the difficulty gets increased, to keep the hash rate more or less constant. So you're using more and more hardware and more and more energy to basically achieve the same result as previously. This stops being profitable as soon as you're paying more for electricity than you're earning in coins.

 

Smaller miners often join a mining pool to bundle their resources. This increases the chance of the pool as a whole to get a winning hash. When this happens the money is shared with all members based on how much work they contributed to the pool. The more members/compute power a pool has, the higher the chance of getting a coin, but at the same time more people the money needs to be distributed between. This means you still need to contribute enough/earn enough to offset electric cost, which is very unlikely.

 

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/mastering-bitcoin/9781491902639/ch08.html

[GeneralGusher]

Ok thanks guys. I’ll do some more research on this to make my decision thanks again 

[GeneralGusher]

1 hour ago, mariushm said:

Think of it like this ... to make some money each month, you would need maybe 20 or more RX 570 or better cards (with 4GB of memory minimum each ) and free electricity (a river and a water generator or some solar panels)

 

A single video card would make equivalent of PENNIES within a month, Also, a lot of mining algorithms require at least 4 GB of video card memory to mine.

 

 

Do you think that investing on used cards would be a good idea or no?

[mariushm]

35 minutes ago, GeneralGusher said:

Do you think that investing on used cards would be a good idea or no?

It's a stupid question.

A RX 470 or RX 570 or better is a perfectly fine used card for 1080p gaming, they'll still run most modern AAA games at 50-60fps, more if you lower quality settings.  So from that perspective, yes, it's worth investing on such used cards.

 

Is it worth for mining? No, probably not. For the money you pay for 10-15 video cards, you can buy a dedicated miner which uses less power and is more profitable... however the downside is that the difficulty of mining goes up all the time so in a few months that miner becomes more or less useless and you'd more or less throw it away... so the beauty of video cards is that after you use them 6 months or so for mining, you can sell them and make some money back.

 

With these RX 470 .. RX 570 cards level cards, right now you would probably mine less coin than the amount of electricity you would consume... that's why i mentioned in my post that your electricity would have to be free, or you'd need to consume some excess of energy that you can use without remorse (let's say you've invested some money in a power generator and the minimum that made sense to buy was 50 kilowatt, but right now you're only consuming 5 kilowatt ... so it would make sense to make use of that 40-45 kilowatt difference as its free unused energy)